The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn

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lips, I haven’t found them since.

      [1909; 1917]

Poems 1919–1933

       The Afternoon Sun

      This room, how well I know it.

      Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door,

      for commercial offices. The entire house has now become

      offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies.

      Ah, this room, how familiar it is.

      Near the door, here, was the sofa,

      and in front of it a Turkish rug;

      Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.

      On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror.

      In the middle, the table where he’d write;

      and the three big wicker chairs.

      Near the window was the bed

      where we made love so many times.

      They must be somewhere still, poor things.

      Near the window was the bed:

      the afternoon sun came halfway up.

      … At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted

      for one week only … Alas,

      that week became an eternity.

      [1918; 1919]

       To Stay

      One in the morning it must have been,

      or half past one.

      In a corner of that dive;

      in back of the wooden partition.

      Apart from the two of us, the place completely empty.

      A kerosene lamp barely shed some light.

      The vigilant servant was sleeping by the door.

      No one would have seen us. But

      we were so on fire for each other

      that caution was beyond us anyway.

      Our clothes were half undone—we weren’t wearing much,

      since it was blazing hot, a heavenly July.

      Delight in flesh amidst

      clothes half undone:

      quick baring of flesh—the image of it

      has crossed twenty-six years; and now has come

      to stay here in this poetry.

      [1918; 1919]

       Of the Jews (50 A.D.)

      Painter and poet, runner and thrower,

      Endymion’s beauty: Ianthes, son of Antonius.

      From a family close to the Synagogue.

      “The days that I most value are the ones

      when I abandon the aesthetic quest,

      when I forsake the beauty and rigor of the Hellenic,

      with its overriding preoccupation

      with perfectly formed and perishable white limbs.

      And I become what I would like

      always to remain: of the Jews, of the holy Jews, the son.”

      A bit too heated, this declaration of his. “Always

      remain of the Jews, of the holy Jews—”

      But he ­didn’t remain one at all.

      the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria

      made the boy into their devotee.

      [1912; <1919?]

       Imenus

      “… it should be loved all the more,

      the pleasure that’s attained unwholesomely and in corruption;

      only rarely finding the body that feels things as it wants to—

      the pleasure that, unwholesomely and in corruption, produces

      a sensual intensity, which good health does not know …”

      A fragment of a missive

      from the youth Imenus (of patrician stock), infamous

      in Syracuse for dissipation,

      in the dissipated times of Michael the Third.

      [1915; 1919; 1919]

       Aboard the Ship

      It certainly resembles him, this small

      pencil likeness of him.

      Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:

      an enchanting afternoon.

      The Ionian Sea all around us.

      It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.

      To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,

      and it illumined his expression.

      Handsomer, he seems to me,

      now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.

      Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—

      the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

      [1919; 1919]

      Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)

      His every expectation turned out wrong!

      He used to imagine that he’d do celebrated deeds,

      would end the shame that since the time of the Battle

      of Magnesia had ground his homeland down.

      That Syria again would be a mighty power,

      with her armies, with her fleets,

      with her great encampments, with her wealth.

      He endured it, grew embittered in Rome

      when he sensed, in the conversation of his friends,

      the scions of the great houses,

      in the midst of all the delicacy and politesse

      that they showed toward him, toward the son

      of King Seleucus Philopator—

      when he sensed that nonetheless there was always a hidden

      disdain for the dynasties of the Greek East:

      which were in decline, not up to serious affairs,

      quite unfit for the leadership of peoples.

      He’d withdraw, alone, and grow indignant, and swear

      that it wouldn’t be the way they thought, at all.

      Look, he has the will:

      would struggle, would do it, would rise up.

      If only he could find

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